


Summation

by kaitain



Category: Trance (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 22:57:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaitain/pseuds/kaitain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The surface is the interim, the moment of breathless limbo, the flinch before a heavy blow connects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summation

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> _"What we are is the sum of everything we've ever said, done, felt."_  
> 

The surface curtsies to meet him— or perhaps it is he who rises to meet it— and at once his ears pop wetly and his eyes are wide and stinging in the open as if with smoke, but it is only chlorine, acrid and artificial. It is a burn that cannot compare to greedy tongues of fire lapping at his suit and skin— because nothing compares.

The surface is the interim, the moment of breathless limbo, the flinch before a heavy blow connects. The surface parts for the crown of his head just as it did for the car; it parts just as his lips did, rent and screaming in the split second it took for the car to plunge down beneath that precious veil.

Frank tongues the place where the still-healing split in his lips rubs against the uneven ridges of his teeth and dimly recalls screaming, pleading for help. His lips twitch painfully into a tiny smile as he recalls that his salvation came in the form of a semitruck.

He heaves himself out of the pool and into the solid harshness of the world above the water. The iPad is abandoned on the kitchen table; he intends for it to stay there.

Franck does not take the elevator to her apartment, and will not until long after his blood has been cleaned from its floor. He takes the stairs, the shock of each one a comforting thrum moving through his soles and up his legs and into the roiling pit of his stomach, quelling his unease as he counts each step, each floor, each door that is not hers.

When he arrives, she doesn’t turn him away.

"I don’t want to forget," Franck breathes at last, and his voice is thick and full and heavy despite the constriction of his throat.

Elizabeth smiles, and Franck remembers only her face contorted in horror and slick with tears, remembers his trembling hand on the wheel and his wrist raw from its binding and the mouth of his own gun pressed to the nape of his neck, gasping as always in its mute, metallic surprise. “It’s okay if you do,” she replies, and he remembers first hearing her voice through half of a pair of headphones, husky and calming, a practiced tone, one that she has mastered.

He hates that she is using that tone on him.

"I am not the cowardly man that forgot you," he hisses, lips curling back in a snarl.

There’s a crack, then, in her facade. Light spills into her eyes and glints there as she looks down at her nails, lashes fluttering when she can’t, if only for a moment, look at him. “You aren’t,” she agrees. He hears her exhale slowly, collecting herself. “You aren’t that man at all,” she repeats, voice straining.

Neither of them want to say his name, and so both of their gazes flicker toward the Goya for guidance, watching the dance of the eponymous witches in the air from where they hang, static, on Elizabeth's wall. Her lips quirk faintly at the corners; it is a smile that is all at once radiant and agonizing.

Birdlike, Franck tilts his head, watching her. His fingers twitch toward hers over the top of the table, but it is too late: she has drawn away, folding her hands in her lap, wringing them slowly beneath the lacquered surface of the table, beneath that interim that separates their carefully set faces and voices from the trembling rest of them, from Elizabeth’s shaking hands and Franck’s incessantly bouncing leg.

"Don’t be angry," she tells him, and for a moment he does not understand, opens his mouth to protest that he isn’t angry with her. She shakes her head slowly; she knows who he is angry with. "To be angry is to be a victim, Franck."

He remembers that, as well.

"I don’t want you to be one." She looks up, her eyes once more steely and severe. "You didn’t need to go through any of this. I’m giving you an out."

"I told you: I don’t want it." Franck’s voice is a growl as he leans forward, low and threatening— but his eyes are pleading, lips trembling as unspoken, inarticulate words beat against them from behind.

The current is heavy, pressing down on them with enough force that the pressure pounds in Franck’s ears and along the suddenly aching fissures of his once-broken nose, and he longs for weightlessness. He thinks that what he wishes for is the comfort of water.

Elizabeth reaches for his hand, and as they look once more to the Goya, he realizes that what they truly need is air.

**Author's Note:**

> sob vincent cassel and rosario dawson were perfect in these roles imo ; u; but okay this is neither very long nor very good but just. shh let me have an ending where they meet up again, regardless of how you interpret the actual ending. like, the "franck actually having been hypnotized (and reliving/recovering his memories)" theory would work with this fic too— in fact, maybe nothing in this fic even really "happens" and is all in his mind!! totally up to interpretation. u wu


End file.
